Another Bicyclist Has Been Killed in Columbus.
On Tuesday, January 30th, another bicyclist was killed by a driver in Columbus.
We appreciate that Columbus City Council released a statement on February 1 in response to this tragic event and recent bicyclist and pedestrian deaths in the weeks and months prior. Community members and advocates, while hopeful about plans like LinkUs and BikePlus, are disturbed and upset about the lack of short term solutions to quickly stem the growing tide of road violence, injuries, and death aided by unsafe infrastructure and growing size of vehicles.
We grieve for the death of the bicyclist on Morse last Tuesday, where there is a large, unprotected bike lane on a dangerous, high traffic, high speed road where drivers consistently exceed speed limits. A road where even at the proper speed limit, a car is highly likely to kill vulnerable road users upon impact. We grieve for the death of the 67-year-old bicyclist killed on South High, where many community members can be seen traveling by bicycle, despite lack of any protected infrastructure. We grieve for the children who were killed on Cleveland Avenue last October, and for their family and community. Cleveland Avenue has long been cited as one of the most dangerous streets in the city, and yet we have not seen any immediate action to address this in the short term while long-term improvements are made. We grieve for every bicyclist and pedestrian that has been killed on our streets, for the many who have been injured and traumatized, and for the countless more (including ourselves) who experience close calls every day.
We would like to see the Department of Public Service provide city leadership with recommendations for stop-gap solutions while longer term improvements are made. They could draw from many such solutions implemented by other cities, including: the use of temporary barriers for unprotected lanes; corner hardening and daylighting to increase safety and visibility in intersections; pedestrian refuge islands (even the name evokes the danger that is ever-present) across large roads like Morse; banning right turns at red lights; and changing signal programming and establishing lead intervals to allow for pedestrians, wheelchair/mobility device users, and cyclists to cross safely.
Since we have not seen movement in these areas, despite the constant uptick in pedestrian and bicyclist injuries and deaths, we plan to attend this evening’s City Council meeting and present solutions to move forward. Our proposed solutions are informed by other cities who have recognized the urgency of taking measures to stem the hemorrhage of death and injury caused by unsafe road design and poor policy choices of the past. These solutions were gathered through first hand experience, research into well-tested methods and results, and have been discussed with our friends and colleagues in the public works and public service departments in Indianapolis, Washington DC, Chicago, and even here in Ohio. We have put these solutions together ourselves because we cannot wait any longer. Every death is one too many.
We recognize and appreciate City Council’s efforts to encourage their colleagues and other city leadership to address these issues. They are working to educate themselves around transit and mobility issues, which affect everyone in the city. We also recognize their limitations in their ability to impose their goals upon the executive branch of the city.
Still, we push Council to do more. To do what is within their power to work with—or in spite of—their colleagues to meet the needs of their constituents and their community. As a part of this effort, we urge City Council to reestablish the defunct pedestrian and cyclist safety commission outlined in City Code Chapter 2103.
We want to see Mayor Ginther make pedestrian and bicyclist safety a priority and demand next steps on this front not only from the Department of Public Service, but from all city agencies that have a role to play, including Columbus Public Health, Code Enforcement, and others. We need Council and DPS to adopt a strong Complete Streets policy, which would require every project to go through a complete streets process. We need DPS to update Columbus’s Crosswalk Design Memo to safer standards, and to adopt the newest federally-approved Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) bike lane standards.
We need to see more authority given to the new Vision Zero coordinator, whose role, as we understand it, is only an advisory and educational role within DPS. We have seen Vision Zero plans fail again and again across the country—not because these principles are themselves a failure, but because cities fail to actually follow the strategies set out in their Vision Zero plans.
Finally, we need more public accountability for the city’s progress on Vision Zero goals and tactics. We engage with City Council because they and their staff have made themselves available to us and have recognized the urgency of these important safety initiatives. But we need the folks doing the planning and engineering to understand the fear, anger, and pain that we all experience on a daily basis, and how their work can improve the lives of everyone in our city.
We are not doing this to place blame. We understand that city planning is undergoing a massive shift, and that change is difficult. We understand that there has been a recent leadership change in DPS which is sure to have caused some amount of disruption.
What we need DPS and city leadership to understand is that it is also difficult to walk or ride down your street each day wondering if you’ll meet your death at the next intersection. It is difficult to worry if every car that you hear behind you will make room for you, or will pass you within mere inches at speeds that would break every bone in your body. It is difficult to let your children play outside and remain anxious at every moment that a loose toy or fanciful whim will cause them to wander too close to the street. It is difficult to suddenly have a friend or family member taken from you in an instant, in a place where the paint in the asphalt indicates that cars shouldn’t enter. But we all know by now that paint alone can’t save us.
We must not wait any longer to protect our children, our family members, our neighbors, our teachers, our workers, ourselves. We need to push forward together—not just for the future, but right now. Each and every individual death caused by our unsafe infrastructure is a failure of the city, of community leaders, of advocates—of all of us.
